Case-study anchor: BP plc · stakeholder governance through chief executive transitions (Looney 2020–2023; Auchincloss reset 2024).
Three things to carry forward
- Power and interest are not static. Mendelow's matrix prompts a snapshot. The discipline is taking it more than once. A board that mapped its stakeholders in 2020 and has not re-mapped in 2024 is using a four-year-old map of a firm whose stakeholder universe has materially changed.
- The matrix tells you who you must engage. It does not tell you whose views must prevail. That is a value choice, which in UK statutory law is a section 172 duty, sitting outside the framework. A board that uses Mendelow alone, without a stated stakeholder doctrine, is hiding the value choice inside an analytical instrument.
- The Mendelow exercise fails when "key player" silently becomes "keep happy". High-power, high-interest stakeholders are to be managed CLOSELY, not appeased. Stakeholder analysis without spine becomes stakeholder management without judgment.
A reading
Foundational text
- Mendelow, A. (1991) "Environmental Scanning: The Impact of the Stakeholder Concept." Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems, Cambridge, MA. The original power-by-interest matrix paper. Often cited through secondary sources because the original is difficult to access.
- Johnson, G., Whittington, R., Regnér, P., Angwin, D. and Scholes, K. (current edn) Exploring Strategy: Text and Cases. Harlow: Pearson. The textbook where the Mendelow matrix is most commonly taught at MSc and senior-practitioner level. Sets the working version of the framework.
BP plc · primary record
- BP plc · Annual Reports and Form 20-F filings, 2020 to 2024. Available via bp.com.
- BP plc · Regulatory News Service announcements: the "Reimagining Energy" strategy (February 2020), the chief executive resignation (September 2023), the strategy reset (February 2024). Available via the London Stock Exchange RNS.
- Activist investor correspondence with BP plc, 2022 to 2023. Reporting via the Financial Times and Bloomberg, including letters from Bluebell Capital Partners pressing for strategy change.
Critique and theory
- Freeman, R.E. (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman. The broader theoretical foundation that Mendelow's matrix operationalises. The 2010 Cambridge University Press reissue carries Freeman's reflections on twenty-six years of stakeholder theory and its limitations.
- Bryson, J.M. (2004) "What to do when Stakeholders Matter: Stakeholder Identification and Analysis Techniques." Public Management Review. The standard critique of static stakeholder matrices and the case for iterative re-mapping.
A question
For the highest-power, highest-interest stakeholder on your map today, what specifically have you done in the last twelve months that they would say you did because of their view?
If the answer is "we kept them informed", that stakeholder is being managed, not engaged.
The wider library
This Note is a diagnostic framework. It works inside the stakeholder set:
- Strategy Room Note 09 (Freeman's Stakeholder Theory · BP). The theoretical foundation. Freeman's normative argument; Mendelow's diagnostic instrument.
- Strategy Room Note 14 (Shareholder Primacy vs Stakeholder Capitalism · BP). The doctrinal split that decides how Mendelow's "manage closely" instruction is interpreted in practice.
- Strategy Room Note 15 (BP Strategic Stack · BP). The synthesis Note where Mendelow's matrix sits alongside the other BP-anchored frameworks as a stack.
- Ethics Room Note 02 (Section 172). The statutory codification of the stakeholder regard duty. Mendelow tells you who to look at; s.172 tells you what they are owed.
The BP case anchors Strategy Room Notes 09 to 15. Risk Room Note 04 (BP Deepwater Horizon) carries the BP time-slice exception: same organisation, two analytical lenses, fourteen years apart.